John Hazlitt

Artist Info

John HazlittMarshfield, England, 1767 - 1837, Stockport, England

Hazlitt, John (1767–1837), miniature and portrait painter, was born on 13 May 1767 at Marshfield, Gloucestershire, the eldest son of the Revd William Hazlitt (1737–1820), Unitarian minister, originally from Shronell, co. Tipperary, and his wife, Grace, née Loftus (1746–1837), daughter of Thomas and Grace Loftus. Hazlitt's father was a bold and controversial minister and religious writer who played a prominent role in the development of Unitarian theology in England, Ireland, and America in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

Hazlitt's first three years were spent in Marshfield, before the family moved to Maidstone, Kent, where his father served as Presbyterian minister in the town for the next ten years. Here, two of Hazlitt's siblings were born: Margaret (1770–1841) and William Hazlitt (1778–1830), the celebrated writer and essayist. In 1780 the Hazlitts moved to Bandon, co. Cork, at what was a troubled time for the family. John's father sought to alleviate the suffering of American prisoners of war who were held at Kinsale prison, but, in doing so, he incurred the displeasure of officers at a nearby British military garrison. Following death threats the family left Ireland for America in 1783. They sailed from Cove on 3 April, arriving in New York harbour on 26 May. They spent the next three years in America and it was here that John Hazlitt's career as a miniature and portrait painter began.

A self-taught artist, Hazlitt began painting portraits in the early 1780s. His time in America was very much a coming of age, both personally and professionally, and he quickly gained a reputation as a talented portraitist. In spring 1785, aged seventeen, he advertised to open a drawing school with the English-born miniature painter Joseph Dunkerley (d. 1806), with the school to be run from Dunkerley's house in North Square, Boston. However, in June Hazlitt advertised that he intended to paint portraits in Salem, Massachusetts. Over the next two years he executed miniature, pastel, and oil pictures in Salem, Weymouth, Dorchester, and Hingham. He painted portraits of prominent figures including the scientist John Winthrop, the Congregational ministers Ebenezer Gay and William Bentley, the revolutionary army officers Benjamin Lincoln and Nathan Rice, and the physician Dr Joshua Barker. He is also known to have painted a picture of two wild turkeys for the Boston merchant Samuel Vaughan.

Though Hazlitt worked in America primarily as a portrait painter, he appears to have supplemented his income with interior decorative painting and may also have gained commissions for architectural studies. He has been credited with the high-quality ornamented panelling, depicting English landscape scenes, from two houses in Hingham, Massachusetts, owned by the Thaxter family. Other works—now owned by the Hingham Historical Society—include raised decorative panels for the home of the loyalist Elisha Leavitt. In 1900 the Wampatuck Club, Canton, purchased seventeen decorated panels, thought to be the work of Hazlitt, which now cover the club's chimney wall.

By 1786 the finances of the elder William Hazlitt were depleted and it became clear that permanent residence in America was no longer possible. Aged nineteen, John Hazlitt returned to England with his mother and siblings in autumn 1786 and his father followed them a few months later. In 1787 the family settled in Wem, Shropshire, but John remained in London to develop his career as an artist. As John's great-nephew William Carew Hazlitt later noted, ‘His progress and success in his calling as a miniaturist must have been extraordinary’ (Hazlitt, 1.211). His work was informed by Jonathan Richardson's writings on the theory of art. In 1788, at the Royal Academy, Hazlitt exhibited four miniatures after paintings by Sir Joshua Reynolds. He exhibited work at the academy each year from 1788 to 1819, apparently attracting warm praise from Reynolds. Hazlitt's success enabled him to rent a studio at 288 High Holborn, before moving to 12 Rathbone Place. On 16 May 1789, at St Anne's, Soho, he married Mary Pierce (1768–1846) of Portsea, Hampshire, the daughter of Thomas and Dorothy Pierce, and a descendant of James Pierce, who was dissenting minister at Exeter between 1715 and 1726. The couple had three children, Harriet (1802–1882), Mary (1805–1876), and William (1810–1885). The Hazlitts were lifelong friends of Charles and Mary Lamb and, according to the latter, Mary Hazlitt suffered from John's behaviour during the marriage. In November 1809 Mary Lamb wrote that Hazlitt ‘has been very disorderly lately’, recounting that he had returned from the alehouse with one Mr Brown:

a gentleman he had hired as a madkeeper to take care of him at forty pounds a year ... It was with great difficulty, and by threatening to call the aid of the watchman & constables that she [Mary Hazlitt] could prevail on Mr Brown to leave the house. (Marrs, 3.31)

Concerns about Hazlitt's alcoholism persisted throughout his life.

None the less Hazlitt's artistic career proved lucrative. In 1804 he moved his studio to more fashionable quarters at 109 Great Russell Street, Bloomsbury, where he advertised portraits at 7 guineas each. Five years later he earned 54 guineas in Rochester, Kent, and he is said to have been offered the position of miniature painter to Tsar Alexander I, though he declined because of his distaste for despotic government. Hazlitt had been connected to London's radical political circles since the early 1790s. He was a close friend of William Godwin, Thomas Holcroft, and John Thelwall, among other leading reformers. His portrait of Thelwall (c.1800–1805; NPG), depicts the Jacobin orator as intellectual and calm, and thus at odds with his portrayal by political loyalists (Poole, 6). In November 1794 Hazlitt and his wife celebrated the acquittal of Thomas Hardy, founding member of the London Corresponding Society, following charges of treason. In the same month Hazlitt was mentioned during the trial of John Horne Tooke when a meeting of the Society for Constitutional Information at the Crown and Anchor tavern, held on 29 June 1792, came under legal scrutiny. At the meeting Hazlitt was reported to have received hundreds of copies of Thomas Paine's A Letter to Secretary Dundas for distribution. Though Hazlitt remained close to his brother William throughout his life, his influence on the development of William's career—in artistic and radical political circles—was particularly marked in the opening years of this decade.

In addition to Thelwall, Hazlitt's sitters included his brother William (two undated studies; Maidstone Museum and Bentlif Art Gallery), Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Thomas Clarkson (undated; Colchester and Ipswich museums), Edward Jenner, Charles Kemble, Joseph Lancaster (c.1818; NPG), Theophilus Lindsay, and Arthur Young, He also continued to produce landscape, biblical, and historical paintings following his return from America. In February 1806 Charles Lamb lamented that Hazlitt was at work on a large painting of the Virgin Mary with child, modelled on his wife and six-month-old daughter Mary: ‘He is a clever man ... But he will go on painting things he ought not to paint, & not painting things he ought to paint’ (Marrs, 2.208). William Carew Hazlitt also noted that his great-uncle once undertook ‘a recumbent Aphrodite on an unprecedentedly large canvas’ (Hazlitt, 1.215).

By 1815 Hazlitt's fortunes appear to have been on the wane. In the autumn of that year he applied for an associateship at the Royal Academy, but failed to receive a single vote. That he was also advertising for sitters in newspapers suggests he was struggling to find commissions. Little is known of his later career: in 1824 he moved to a cottage just outside Exeter, presumably to be closer to his sister Margaret and his mother, who lived at Crediton. He finally settled in Stockport, Lancashire, in May 1832 to be near the Carlingfords, a prominent family who had known Hazlitt from a previous provincial tour. He continued to paint in his final years, executing a number of portraits for patrons in Stockport. Though Hazlitt's date of death is unknown, he was buried on 16 May 1837 in St Mary's, Stockport. He was survived by his wife, who died at Newport, Isle of Wight, on 28 April 1846.

Stephen Burley

Sources

E. B. Allen, Early American wall paintings, 1710–1850 (1926) · S. Burley, Hazlitt the dissenter: religion, philosophy, and politics, 1766–1816 (2014) · N. Fletcher Little, American decorative wall painting, 1700–1850 (1952) · W. C. Hazlitt, Memoirs of William Hazlitt, 2 vols. (1867) · S. Jones, Hazlitt: a life (1989) · The letters of Charles and Mary Lamb, ed. E. W. Marrs, 3 vols. (1975–8) · The journal of Margaret Hazlitt, ed. E. J. Moyne (1967) · E. J. Moyne, ‘John Hazlitt, miniaturist and portrait painter in America, 1783–1786’, Winterthur Portfolio, 6 (1970), 33–40 · S. Poole, ‘Gillray, Cruikshank and Thelwall: visual satire, physiognomy and the Jacobin body’, Romantic Circles (Sept 2011); www.rc.umd.edu/praxis/thelwall/HTML/praxis.2011.poole.html, accessed on 14 April 2015 · W. T. Whitley, Art in England, 1800–1820 (1928) · D. Wu, William Hazlitt: the first modern man (2008)

Likenesses

J. Hazlitt, self-portrait, oils, 18th cent., Maidstone Museum and Bentlif Art Gallery, Kent [see illus.] · miniature (as a young man), Maidstone Museum and Bentlif Art Gallery, Kent; repro. in Moyne, ed., Journal, 17 · J. Hazlitt, self-portraits, miniatures, Maidstone Museum and Bentlif Art Gallery · J. Hazlitt, self-portrait, miniature in pencil, Maidstone Museum and Bentlif Art Gallery

Stephen Burley, ‘Hazlitt, John (1767–1837)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, Sept 2015 [http://proxy.bostonathenaeum.org:2055/view/article/98526, accessed 19 Oct 2017]

John Hazlitt (1767–1837): doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/98526